Book Notes

(from the California HISTORIAN)

American Prophet:
The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams

By Peter Richardson

University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2005
• 334 pages, photographs, hardcover, $35
• ISBN 13: 978-0-472-11524-2

Reviewed by Sara Stanley Baz, History Instructor
Linn-Benton Community College, Albany, Oregon

Some of the most influential work written in the 1930s and 1940s in the fields of farm labor, racism, civil liberties and other California issues was written by Carey McWilliams. His titles range from his early Factories in the Fields: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (1939) to The Liberal and the War Crisis (1940) to Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) to A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (1948) and North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States (1949), to name only a few.

Scores of his magazine and newspaper articles also address issues of social justice. In addition, McWilliams practiced law, served as Chief of the California division of Immigration and Housing and was a member of innumerable reform-minded organizations. In the 1950s, he became editor of The Nation, a position that he filled until 1975.

Peter Richardson’s literary biography, American Profit: The Life and work of Carey McWilliams, portrays McWilliams as a powerhouse of a man — a very private man in some respects, and yet engaged with others through his work. This scholarly review reflects the impact of McWilliams’ work — for example, showing how his books were used as evidence in court cases such as Korematsu v. United States, a landmark case contesting Japanese internment during World War II. Justice Frank Murphy in his dissenting opinion cited McWilliams’ work, Prejudice: Japanese Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance (1944). McWilliams is also credited with contributing to Cesar Chavez’s political education. “In those early years,” Chavez remembered, “I was hungry for any information on organizing, particularly farm labor, and some of the first books I read…were Factories in the Fields, North from Mexico, and Brothers Under the Skin… These books gave me new insights into the forces that create wealth and poverty.”

Carey McWilliams was a pivotal figure in the worlds of politics and ideas from the 1930s through the 1970s. During these early years, he wrote articles about writers, including George Sterling, Robinson Jeffers and Mary Austin, forming a network of literary friends in the process. After becoming a lawyer, he worked in a conventional practice but soon became involved in cases involving racial injustice to Latinos, such as the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial. He belonged to groups defending the rights of immigrants, guarding civil liberties and organizing farm labor.

Richardson ably interweaves McWilliams’ accomplishments with telling views of the broader history of the eras in which he worked. Although he relates McWilliams’ background and identifies influences, he doesn’t really answer the question of what caused him to become the man he was. Perhaps such a question is unanswerable.

What Richardson demonstrates through relating his broad scope of work is that “McWilliams personifies a lost ethic of civic participation to a new generation of academics.” In summing up his significance, Richardson states that — for the sheer body of work he left — [McWilliams] must be judged as one of the most versatile American public intellectuals of the 20th century.